A Study of Event Traffic During the Shared Manipulation of Objects Within a Collaborative Virtual Environment

Abstract

Event management must balance consistency and responsiveness above the requirements of shared object interaction within a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) system. An understanding of the event traffic during collaborative tasks helps in the design of all aspects of a CVE system. The application, user activity, the display interface, and the network resources, all play a part in determining the characteristics of event management. Linked cubic displays lend themselves well to supporting natural social human communication between remote users. To allow users to communicate naturally and subconsciously, continuous and detailed tracking is necessary. This, however, is hard to balance with the real-time consistency constraints of general shared object interaction. This paper aims to explain these issues through a detailed examination of event traffic produced by a typical CVE, using both immersive and desktop displays, while supporting a variety of collaborative activities. We analyze event traffic during a highly collaborative task requiring various forms of shared object manipulation, including the concurrent manipulation of a shared object. Event sources are categorized and the influence of the form of object sharing as well as the display device interface are detailed. With the presented findings the paper wishes to aid the design of future systems.

How 3D Interaction Metaphors Affect User Experience in Collaborative Virtual Environment

“…To our knowledge, a few studies have been conducted investigating the effectiveness of supporting teamwork between a geographically distributed group for the shard manipulation of objects [17,18], the cooperative object manipulation [19]. But not the effect of 3D interaction metaphors on the user experience in a CVE-oriented task.…”

Collaborative Tele-Haptic Application and Its Experiments

“…Collaboration level 3 is where users manipulate the same object together. Another classification of collaboration is by Wolff et al (Wolff, R., Roberts, D.J., Otto, O. June 2004) where they divided collaboration on a same object into sequential and concurrent manipulations. The concurrent manipulation consists of manipulation of distinct and same object's attributes.…”

“…For the first case, we use a symmetric manipulation model where the option is using common component of users' actions in order to produce the object's reactions or movements. According to Wolff et al (Wolff, R., Roberts, D.J., Otto, O. June 2004) where events traffic during object manipulations is studied, the manipulation on the same object's attribute generated the most events. Thus, we can focus our study on manipulation on the same object's attribute or manipulation where object's reaction depends on combined inputs from the collaborating users.…”

Comparing collaborative interaction in different virtual environments

“…1 Thus, we focused our study on changes to a single thing's attributes, or situations where the item's reaction depends on the combined inputs of people working together. The first issue we addressed in our research is the effect of haptics on a collaborative interaction.…”